When is it appropriate to use landscape design? How does one know when the process is finished? PLJV developed the following list of minimum standards that a landscape design plan should meet.

Benefits Partners within Partnerships

• Serves a specific need of a partner (a client) usually within a larger partnership-led effort
• Embodies a commitment by partners to implement conservation actions specified in the landscape conservation design
• Conducted by a multidisciplinary team of scientists and managers often including human dimensions specialists

Drives Effective and Efficient Conservation Action

• Addresses a definitive and measurable conservation goal or set of goals
• Addresses a specific or suite of specific current conservation programs and informs them as to need and development of new conservation practices/programs or change in how existing ones are used
• Informs location and magnitude of conservation action in an efficient manner
• Incorporates new information on landscape pattern and conservation progress iteratively, and nearly in real time (months not years)

Models Landscape Processes and Patterns

• Acknowledges the impact of humans: their role in creating landscape patterns via economic development, societal needs and cultural traditions
• Models processes that are thought to create current landscape patterns
• Predicts future processes that may maintain, change, exacerbate or create new landscape patterns
• Addresses all important processes and patterns simultaneously

Incorporates Specific Steps and/or Products

• Depends on accurate, high quality and recent spatial data
• Determines currently protected areas (i.e., conservation estate)
• Delineates permanent human infrastructure
• Evaluates progress toward the measurable goal at each step in the process
• Generates spatially explicit products that demonstrate attainment of the goal and can be stepped down to guide local conservation action
• Maintains listed assumptions and tests where needed/desired